CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ALIAS MR. ANDERSON

DOCTOR Sydney Angus Crang looked at his watch, as he stepped from a taxi the next afternoon, and entered the Bayne-Miloy Hotel. It was fifteen minutes of two. He approached the desk and obtained a blank card. “From J. B.,” he wrote upon it. He handed it to the clerk.

“Please send this up to Mr. R. L. Peters,” he requested.

He leaned nonchalantly against the desk as a bellboy departed with the card. From where he stood the front windows gave him a view of the street, and he could see Birdie parking the taxi a little way up past the entrance. He smiled pleasantly as he waited.

Presently the bell-boy returned with the information that Mr. Peters would see him; and, following the boy upstairs, he was ushered into the sitting room of one of the Bayne-Miloy's luxurious suites. A tall man with a thin, swarthy face confronted him. Between his fingers the tall man held the card that he, Crang, had sent up; and between his lips the tall man sucked assiduously at a quill toothpick.

“Mr. Peters, of course?” Crang inquired easily, as the door closed behind the bell-boy.

Mr. Peters, alias Gilbert Larmon, nodded quietly. “I was rather expecting Mr. Bruce in person,” he said.

Crang looked cautiously around him.

“It still isn't safe,” he said in a lowered voice. “At least, not here; so I am going to take you to him. But perhaps you would prefer that I should explain my own connection with this affair first?”

Again Larmon nodded.

“Perhaps it would be just as well,” he said.

Once more Crang looked cautiously around him.

“We—we are quite alone, I take it?”

“Quite,” said Larmon.

“My name is Anderson, William Anderson,” Crang stated smoothly. “I was the one who telephoned you last night. I am a friend of John Bruce—the only one he's got, I guess, except yourself. Bruce and I used to be boys together in San Francisco. I hadn't seen him for years until we ran into each other here in New York a few weeks ago and chummed up again. As I told you over the phone, I don't know the ins and outs of this, but I know he is in some trouble with a gang that he got mixed up with in the underworld somehow.”

“Tck!” The quill toothpick flexed sharply against one of the tall man's front teeth. “William Anderson”—he repeated the name musingly—“yes, I remember. I sent a telegram in your care to Mr. Bruce a few days ago.”

“Yes,” said Crang.

The quill toothpick appeared to occupy the tall man's full attention for a period of many seconds.

“Are you conversant with the contents of that telegram, Mr. Anderson?” he asked casually at last.

Crang suppressed a crafty smile. Mr Gilbert Larmon was no fool! Mr. Gilbert Larmon stood here as Mr. R. L. Peters—the telegram had been signed: “Gilbert Larmon.” The question that Larmon was actually asking was: How much do you really know?

“Why, yes,” said Crang readily. “I did not actually see the telegram, but Bruce told me it was from a friend of his, a Mr. Peters, who would arrive in New York Wednesday night, and whom he seemed to think he needed pretty badly in his present scrape.” Larmon took a turn or two up and down the room. He halted again before Crang.

“I am obliged to admit that I am both anxious and considerably at sea,” he said deliberately. “There seems to be an air of mystery surrounding all this that I neither like nor understand. You did not allay my fears last night when you telephoned me. Have you no more to tell me?”

Crang shook his head slowly.

“No,” he said. “You've got everything I know. Bruce has been like a clam as far as the nature of what is between himself and this gang is concerned. He will have to tell you himself—if he will. He won't tell me. Meanwhile, he sent you this.”

Crang reached into his pocket and took out the envelope addressed to Mr. R. L. Peters, that he had taken pains to seal the night before.

Larmon took the envelope, stepped over to the window, presumably for better light, and opening the letter, began to read it.

Crang watched the other furtively. The quill toothpick, from a series of violent gyrations, became motionless between Larmon's lips. The thin face seemed to mold itself into sharp, dogged lines. Again and again Larmon appeared to read the letter over; and then the hand that held the sheet of paper dropped to his side, and he stood for a long time staring out of the window. Finally he turned slowly and came back across the room.

“This is bad, Mr. Anderson—far worse than I had imagined,” he said in a hard voice. “I believe you said you would take me to Bruce. This letter asks me to accompany you, and I see we are to go at once.” He motioned toward a box of cigars on the table. “Help yourself to a cigar, Mr. Anderson, and take a chair while I change and get ready. I will only be a few minutes, if you will excuse me for that length of time?”

Crang's face expressed concern.

“Why, certainly, Mr. Peters,” he agreed readily. He helped himself to a cigar, and sat down in a chair. “I'm sorry if it's as bad as that.”

Larmon made no answer, save to nod his head gravely as he stepped quickly toward the door of the apartment's adjoining room.

Crang struck a match and lighted his cigar. The door of the connecting room closed behind Larmon. A cloud of blue smoke veiled Crang's face—and a leer that lighted his suddenly narrowed eyes.

“So that's it, is it?” grinned Crang to himself. “I wondered how he was going to work it! Well, I guess he would have got away with it, too—if I hadn't got away with it first!”

He sat motionless in his chair—and listened. And suddenly he smiled maliciously. The sound of running water from a tap turned on somewhere on the other side of the connecting door reached him faintly.

“And now a little salt!” murmured Doctor Sydney

Angus Crang. He blew a smoke ring into the air and watched it dissolve. “And, presto!—like the smoke ring—nothing!”

The minutes passed, perhaps five of them, and then the door opened again and Larmon reappeared.

“I'm ready now,” he announced quietly. “Shall we go?”

Crang rose from his chair.

“Yes,” he said. He glanced at Larmon, as he tapped the ash from the end of his cigar. Larmon had not forgotten to change his clothes. “I've got a taxi waiting.”

“All right,” agreed Larmon briskly—and led the way to the elevator.

Out on the street, Crang led the way in turn—to the taxi. Birdie reached out from his seat, and flung the door open. Crang motioned Larmon to enter, and then leaned toward Birdie as though to give the man the necessary address. He spoke in a low, quiet tone:

“Keep to the decent streets as long as you can, so that he won't have a chance to get leery until it won't matter whether he does or not. Understand?”

Birdie touched his cap.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

The taxi jerked forward.

“It's not very far,” said Crang. He smiled engagingly as he settled back in his seat—and his hand in his coat pocket sought and fondled his revolver.

Larmon, apparently immersed in his own thoughts, made no immediate reply. The taxi traversed a dozen blocks, during which time Crang, quite contented to let well enough alone, made no effort at conversation. Larmon chewed at his quill toothpick until, following a savage little click, he removed it in two pieces from his mouth. He had bitten it in half. He tossed the pieces on the floor, and produced a fresh one from his pocket.

“My word!” observed Crang dryly. “You've got good teeth.”

Larmon turned and looked at him.

“Yes, Mr. Anderson, I have!” His voice was level. “And I am going to show them—when I get hold of Bruce.”

Crang's expression was instantly one of innocent bewilderment.

“Why,” he said, “I thought you——”

“Have you ever met the lady?” Larmon asked abruptly.

“The—lady?” Crang glanced out of the window. Birdie was making good time, very good time indeed. Another five minutes at the outside and the trick was done.

“The woman in the case,” said Larmon.

“Oh!” Crang whistled low. “I see! No, I've never met her. I didn't know there was one. I told you he had said nothing to me.”

Larmon was frowning heavily; his face was strained and worried. He laughed out suddenly, jerkily.

“I suppose I should give him credit for keeping you at least in the dark,” he said shortly; “though it strikes me as more or less of a case of locking the stable door after the horse has gone.”

Crang's eyebrows were raised in well-simulated perplexity.

“I don't quite get you, Mr. Peters,” he said politely.

“It's of no consequence.” Larmon's eyes were suddenly fastened on the window. From an already shabby street where cheap tenements hived a polyglot nationality, the taxi had swerved into an intersection that seemed more a lane than anything else, and that was still more shabby and uninviting. “This is a rather sordid neighborhood, isn't it?” he observed curiously.

“It's safe,” said Crang significantly.

The taxi stopped.

“We get out here, Mr. Peters,” Crang announced pleasantly, as Birdie opened the door. “It's a bit rough, I'll admit; but”—he shrugged his shoulders and smiled—“you'll have to blame Bruce, not me. Just follow me, Mr. Peters—it's down these steps.”

He began to descend the steps of a cellar entrance, which was unprepossessingly black, and which opened from the rear of a seedy looking building that abutted on the lane. He did not look behind him. Larmon had made sure that the letter was to be relied upon, hadn't he?—and it was John Bruce, not anybody else, that Larmon was trusting now. Certainly, it was much easier to lead Larmon as long as Larmon could be led; if Larmon hesitated about following, Birdie stood ready to pitch the other headlong down the steps—the same end would be attained in either case!

But Larmon still showed no suspicion of the good faith of one William Anderson. He was following without question. The daylight streaking down through the entrance afforded enough light to enable Crang, over his shoulder, to note that Larmon was always close behind him. At a door across the cellar Crang gave two raps, three times repeated, and as the door was opened, entered with Larmon beside him.

The man who had let them in—one of three, who had evidently been rolling dice at a table close to the entrance—closed the door behind them, and resumed his game.

“If you'll just wait here a minute, Mr. Peters,” Crang said breezily, “I'll find Bruce for you.”

He did not wait for a reply. It mattered very little as to what Larmon said or did now, anyhow—Larmon's exit was barred by three men! He walked up the length of the low-ceiled, evil-smelling place, and with a key which he took from his pocket unlocked a door at the farther end. As he stepped through the door his revolver was in his hand.

He laughed in an ugly way, as John Bruce rose from the mattress and faced him.

“Salt is a great thing, isn't it?” he jeered. He drew from his pocket the slip of paper he had cut from the bottom of the letter, and held it so that John Bruce could see it. Then he put it back in his pocket again. “Understand? He got the rest of the letter, all right; and so he has come down to pay you a little visit. He's outside there now.”

John Bruce made no answer.

Crang laughed again.

“You thought you'd double-cross me, did you? You poor fool! Well, it's a showdown now. I'm going to bring him in here—and let you tell him what he's up against. I guess you can convince him. He's got less than an hour in which to come across—if you are going to sail on that steamer. If you don't make yourself useful to that extent, you go out—for keeps; and Larmon stays here until he antes up—or rots! Is that quite clear?”

John Bruce's lips scarcely moved.

“Yes; it is quite clear,” he said.

“I thought it would be!” snarled Crang—and backed out through the door.